Showing posts with label land use. Show all posts
Showing posts with label land use. Show all posts

Monday, 14 July 2014

Mapping natural capital

A presentation from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) on mapping natural capital. In the first section, Dr Lisa Norton talks about modelling approaches using site survey for national scale mapping, explaining why natural capital is mapped and how it is useful for land managers, with examples including Countryside Survey and the UK Soil Observatory.

In the second part of the talk, John Watkins of CEH focuses on the Ecomaps application, which will enable researchers to take such work forward.






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Friday, 28 March 2014

Sustainable Land Management Science Area at CEH

CEH's new Science Strategy identifies three interdependent, major societal and environmental challenges: Securing the Value of Nature, Building Resilience to Environmental Hazards, and Managing Environmental Change. We're delivering our strategy by Science Areas and underpinning activities, and over the next few weeks we are profiling these on our blog. 

This post focuses on our Sustainable Land Management science area, which is led by Dr Richard Pywell. The research we undertake in this area is delivered in the context of ensuring adequate provision of food, fuel and water while conserving biodiversity and vital ecosystem functions.

CEH develops practical solutions to restore and enhance ecosystem
functions that deliver goods and services crucial for human wellbeing,
such as pollination services for crops and biodiversity.


Population increase, climate change, pollution and other environmental stresses are expected to have highly detrimental impacts on ecosystems and natural resources vital for human wellbeing and livelihoods. Therefore novel land management approaches to optimise natural resources are needed.




CEH's sustainable land management science area aims to understand the threats to semi-natural and highly managed ecosystems, and their component resources. From this understanding, we will develop robust strategies to conserve vital resources and increase their resilience to environmental change. We will also develop practical approaches that can be applied at the field, farm and landscape scale to restore and enhance the ecosystem functions and services crucial for human wellbeing and livelihoods.

Our research activity involves experiments, long-term monitoring, the development of practical land management and restoration techniques, engagement with practitioners and industry and the support of policy development.


Our science helps to protect, restore and enhance ecosystem functions that support food production, such as pollination and pest control.



We also engage with practitioners and the farming industry to develop new, innovative eco-intensive farming systems that are practical and commercially viable.


Future objectives include constructing spatial decision-support tools to balance demands on limited land; developing and testing management and restoration strategies; mapping potential deficits and vulnerabilities of pollination and pest control services to environmental stress; and supporting future land management policies that meet the challenges of sustainable intensification and multi-functional land use.

For more details of these and other objectives in our Sustainable Land Management Science Area, see our Science Area Summary [PDF].

Additional information


CEH Science Strategy 2014-2019

CEH Science Areas

Staff page of Dr Richard Pywell, Science Area Lead for Sustainable Land Management
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Thursday, 22 August 2013

INTECOL news round-up: pollinators, citizen science and land use

As the INTECOL 2013 congress moves into its fifth (and penultimate) day, here is a brief round-up of some of the news from this week's event featuring CEH researchers:

  • Important results from a CEH-led project under the Insect Pollinators Initiative have been highlighted, which could help land managers and policy makers ensure the countryside is better suited to the needs of pollinators. You can read more about that in our news story, "Ecologists get first bumblebees' eye view of the landscape", on the CEH website.

  • Citizen science, although not particularly new, has been growing in popularity recently. On Wednesday, Dr Michael Pocock of CEH gave a presentation which looked at the diversity of environmental and ecological citizen science and how advances in technology, including social media and mobile phone apps, are transforming 21st century ecology.

    Today, Michael and CEH colleague Dr Helen Roy are leading a workshop that hopes to inspire new citizen science ventures - and are launching a Citizen Science Special Interest Group to help encourage efforts. Michael spoke to the British Ecological Society about this important area of engagement:

    "Citizen science has contributed to long-term data sets that have allowed us to understand the effects of things like climate change that would have been impossible otherwise."

    The new citizen science special interest group is designed to help the next generation of professional ecologists use citizen science effectively. Michael explained, "Many ecologists recognise the importance of engaging with people about science and citizen science provides a way for them to do that while undertaking real scientific research. There is lots of opportunity for creativity and innovation in this area, and you can have lots of impact with little financial investment, so the group will foster and promote this creativity in ecologists, especially those early in their career."
     
  • The Biological Records Centre at CEH recently launched a new citizen science resource 'Ecological Interactions' in association with iSpot. Ecological Interactions is a web tool allowing members of the public to explore and record ecological relationships between species. All organisms are part of a web of connections with other species, often formed by feeding relationships.

    Read more about citizen science coming of age in a news release from the British Ecological Society.

    • Prof James Bullock of CEH was among a group of ecologists discussing the challenges and tools for studying biological invasions on a European level during a workshop on Wednesday which was sponsored by the European Ecological Federation. They outlined the challenges Europe faces in understanding and controlling invasive species. More details can be found in this British Ecological Society blog post.

    • Finally, news of an intriguing study that used maps made more than 70 years ago but which could help reverse pollinator decline today. This is the first study of its kind to look at the impact of historic land use changes on pollinator communities in Britain. It shows that the dramatic changes in land use since World War II, in particular agricultural intensification and urbanisation, have had a significant impact on pollinator communities.

      Using newly-developed statistical techniques, the team from the University of Reading, University of Leeds and Centre for Ecology & Hydrology analysed two sets of historical data: pollinator data from 1921-1950 based on more than half a million records collected by the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society since 1800 and now digitised; and the Dudley Stamp Land Utilisation survey from the 1930s, the earliest known land use map of Britain. By comparing this historical data for 21 sites across England with recent pollinator records and land cover maps, including the 2007 Land Cover Map developed by CEH, they found that 85% of sites had suffered declines in pollinator species richness of between 10 and 50% over the past 80-100 years.

    INTECOL continues at Excel in London until Friday 23 August. Read more about CEH's participation in our previous blog post.

    The hashtag to follow on Twitter for updates and reaction to talks is #INT13.
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